Its not worth it, just upgrade your cpu cooler and overclock. seriously..even a 2500K can still kick ass ! Lol.

My overclocked i7-4790K cpu passmark score with 4.4ghz oc = 12159
Stock i7-7700K cpu passmark score without oc @ 4.2ghz = 12316

 

Last edited: Mar 26, 2017

Intel upgrades have been absolutely lame in the last 5 years. They know AMD couldn't compete and slept on their asses. Now that AMD is fighting back with Zen we should start seeing more improvement in chips in the upcoming years.

 

ee> CPU floorplans are mostly laid out by hand, and CPU have much much lower tolerance to hardware errata than GPUs
ee> so you mostly don't want to touch the core at all on a given process. and in fact it seems Intel has kept the same core layout between client and server for a very long time


Also, Intel has 5-10% IPC improvement YOY i think.

 

Using the stock cooler btw and i can still hit 4.4ghz without my temps going above 25-74 (never has yet). Could you imagine if i got a kick ass cooler? Some people can hit 4.9-5ghz on water easy..i could give a care less about the nano meter technology improvement. i don't mind a higher electric bill.

 

I have an Alienware Aurora R4 with liquid-cooling system and i7 processors on 16 cores. Never had to overclock it. It handles everything that I throw at it doing audio running Windows 7 Pro 64.